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It can be tested in theory. You just need to understand what internal processes constitute consciousness in the brain, understand the internal processes of a LLM, and determine if sufficiently equivalent processes are occurring. Until then we have to do our best based on our current understanding of LLMs and the human mind, based on which I think they aren't. Yeah some of the terms here aren't understood well enough to be well-defined, but the history of science shows that's a common problem.
It matters if you think conscious beings are morally relevant. I remember this blog post from Yudkowsky:
Belief in the Implied Invisible
Unlike understanding the internal activity of the brain and how it compares to the internal activity of an LLM, transmitting information faster than light is, according to our current understanding of physics, actually impossible. Lets say you're working on the spaceship and you think you've discovered a mistake that will, when it tries to land at its destination, cause it to explode. If you report the mistake, the launch will be delayed and you'll suffer professional inconvenience because you missed it for so long. If you don't, you guess the ship will explode and everyone will die, but what actually happens will be completely impossible for anyone on Earth to detect by any means under the laws of physics. Do you report it?
The same is true of fictional characters. If I'm playing D&D I can predict how Throgg the half-orc barbarian will react to his wife dying, but I don't think he's conscious whether he's being roleplayed by a human or a LLM. Note that sometimes fiction doesn't try to be realistic, and the same factors can influence the character whether it's being written by a LLM or not. If Throgg is written as part of a light-hearted black comedy with a running joke about his club, both humans and LLMs are more likely to write his dialogue as part of joke where he responds with indifference to "They burned your house!" and "They burned your wife!" but bursts into tears at "They burned your club!". The only reason LLMs assuming a persona talk similarly to real humans is that most of the text they're trained on incorporates some level of psychological realism and so that is part of their default genre.
OK, say I hypothesize that it's the theta wave in the Xerebullum. How can I test that? How can I show that if the theta waves are interfered with via my Theta Widget, the subject is no longer conscious? We can induce all manner of interesting states of being via drugs, sleep deprivation, religious experiences via magnetizing parts of the brain. But they all have clear exterior signs.
How can consciousness possibly be tested, given it's a solely 'interior' concept? What could I say to another guy who says it's actually some other part of the brain that causes consciousness?
Furthermore, how could we test that there aren't 2 or more different kinds of consciousness? Maybe machines have their own kind of consciousness. Maybe Mixture of Experts models are unconscious but dense models are, any two AI models are probably far more different to eachother than any two humans in cognitive structure.
Better to judge moral worth by behaviour. There are many conscious people who should be destroyed, without regard for their mental state. If Rob is a complete menace: kidnapping, molesting and murdering young children, then mulch him. If Claude is friendly and helpful then be nice to it.
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